Cops in Lamborghinis

[Magikal]

You'll be seeing this next in Kali. As a matter of fact, I even saw a poster like this once, except it had a babe as the cop.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

http://www.signonsandiego.com/uniontrib ... borgh.html

Italy's highway cops become flat-out fast

Catching speeders easy in Lamborghini

By Ian Fisher
NEW YORK TIMES NEWS SERVICE

November 13, 2004

FIANO ROMANO, Italy – It is not a toy, they swear, but a serious piece of police gear, no matter how many Japanese tourists stood at a highway rest stop here snapping away in awe.

"It's a responsibility to drive it," said Chief Inspector Laura Ciano of the Italian highway police.

Paolo Mazzini, a highway police commander, said: "Italian people are not always friendly toward authorities. They are curious, so they accept the ticket more readily.

"It's not for fun," he added.

Still, Superintendent Vincenzo Bizzarro wore a satisfied look on his face when he gave a reporter, fingers dug into fine leather seats, a small taste of what the force's new Lamborghini patrol car can do: nearly 100 mph in just a few seconds, with a row of tollbooths approaching awfully fast. (He mercifully got nowhere near its maximum speed of 190 mph.)

With a slim aerodynamic siren and sleek blue paint job, it looks great, too: a perfectly Italian tool to foil the famously fast and anarchic Italian drivers.

"Can I take a picture?" one man at the rest stop asked.

"Please do," Bizzarro said.

Few make the case that the highway police need a Lamborghini. But in a nation crazed with car racing – where Ferrari, the legendary Italian car company, recently opened a clothing store in Rome, and where engine revving at normal stoplights can feel like the start of an urban rally – few would say they do not need one either. Certainly not the police.

"Some people from Lamborghini had spoken with the police administration about the idea," said Sergio Fontana, a Lamborghini spokesman. "They said, 'Why don't you have a Gallardo for the highway police?' And the police chiefs said, 'Why not?' It is very good for the image of the police and for the image of Lamborghini around the world."

Fontana made no bones about the fact that the inspiration was partly commercial, aimed particularly against Ferrari, the leader in the superfast luxury car market here that put a police car on the road in the 1960s and 1970s.

He said Lamborghini figured it could perform dual duty, helping both itself and the police, and so in May they donated the car, worth about $165,000 before all the fancy electronics (GPS, radar and an automatic license plate scanner, to check for stolen cars), to mark the national police force's 152nd anniversary. The police graciously accepted.

When the police first took ownership, the Gallardo sat parked conspicuously in front of the Polizia di Stato car museum in Rome. In October, it was shipped to New York City for the Columbus Day parade, accompanied by Ciano and Bizzarro, two of the 10 officers specially trained to drive it.

"To drive around Manhattan in a Lamborghini is almost better than in Italy," said Ciano, who noted nonetheless that New York's potholed streets were not great for a car slung so low. "We must have had 2,000 pictures of us taken. Our colleagues in America asked if we all drove Lamborghinis."

The Gallardo has also been doing a fair share of actual highway work – a real service, the police say, in a nation with many fast cars and where the road fatality rate is higher than the European average. It has patrolled around the country, based recently near here, on the highway north from Rome to Florence.

On this stretch this summer, Bizzarro had to push the car up to about 185 mph to stop a Porsche going about 155 – or almost twice the speed limit of 80.

[Simply Joel]

onward to thunderdome...